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Film festival news conferences are generally friendly affairs, giving a movie's stars and director the chance to take a public victory lap. But when the cast of Jason Reitman's drama "Men, Women & Children" gathered at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, the promotional event took on an edgier tone.

The film explores the way the Internet is shaping (and warping) our lives and its themes incited a surprisingly sharp intergenerational debate about the virtues and evils of social media.

Ansel Elgort, at 20 one of the film's youngest stars, boasted that his 2 million Twitter followers gave him the ability to become his own news platform, while the movie's older cast members Jennifer Garner, 42, Adam Sandler, 48, and Rosemarie DeWitt, 39 looked on with expressions of befuddlement, if not horror.

"Is it Tinder or Tumblr that everyone's on?" Garner wondered aloud, echoing a confusion many non-millennials may feel. "I don't know the difference."

Weeks later, DeWitt was still struggling to understand Elgort's point of view. "It was an eye-opener," the actress said recently. "The younger people see [social media] as an opportunity to express themselves and connect. They've never known a world without it. But for the older adults in the room, we were just sitting there with our jaws on the ground. We just don't know what it is."

Social media is viewed both as a way to foster genuine connection while also fueling feelings of alienation, a way of amplifying communication and narcissism. Since the advent of social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram few of which existed when today's young movie audience was born the duality of social media has bedeviled academics, artists and everyday people alike, as long-held social norms established in an analog world have rapidly given way to a new age of selfies, likes and status updates.

Dave Eggers' 2013 novel, "The Circle," gave the world of social media an Orwellian spin. Comedian Louis C.K. ranted on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" last year about how smartphones were ruining our ability to be alone with ourselves ("I go, 'Oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write "hi" to, like, 50 people.'") In the Chainsmokers' recent song "#Selfie," the DJ duo sings about getting only "10 likes in the last five minutes" on an Instagram photo.

Now Hollywood is joining the conversation. "Men, Women & Children" is one of a number of recent films, including "Chef," "Boyhood" and "Birdman," that show filmmakers grappling with the same anxieties about this new reality as many of the rest of us and finding it just as hard to come up with a consensus on what it all means.

Many actors, meanwhile, are struggling with how much to share with their fans which, as a widespread nude photo leak recently demonstrated, is a choice that may no longer even be in their own hands. The same tools that can be used to aid a star's rise to fame can just as easily tear an actor down.

Stars are now routinely asked whether they're on Twitter and Facebook, with the assumption being that the answer reveals something essential about their character or even their level of stardom you have to be pretty confident of your box-office appeal to pull the plug on social media.

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Hollywood explores the virtues and evils of social media